Archive for June, 2011

The Cambodian Center for Human Rights (“CCHR”) today, 30 June 2011, releases an open letter written by CCHR President Ou Virak, in his capacity as a civil society leader and as a victim of the Khmer Rouge, to the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, congratulating him on his re-election and calling on him to review the nature of the UN’s relationship with Cambodia.

Please find attached this open letter in English. A Khmer translation will follow shortly.

More than 30 disabled veteran soldiers from four districts in Siem Reap province continued protests on Tuesday in front of the provincial department of Social Affairs, Veterans, and Youth Rehabilitation, demanding pension payments they claim have been frozen since 2007.

Iet Sivlong, provincial investigator for rights group Licadho, said on Tuesday that the protest began on Monday but dispersed temporarily after the department’s director promised to distribute the last six months’ worth of overdue payments. The protest resumed after no money was disbursed.

Phea Sophat, director of the provincial Social Affairs Department, said that in 2009 the Interior Ministry had deemed about 2,000 disabled veterans in Siem Reap eligible to receive government pension payments.

“I owe about 2,000 disabled soldiers eight billion riel (US$1,942,219) since 2008. I wrote a letter to the Ministry of Economy and Finance through the Ministry of Social Affairs, but the money is yet to be delivered,” he said.

He confirmed that the veterans had the requisite documents to receive their payments, and assured them that the Ministry would deliver the pensions soon. “No Ministry officials have exploited that money,” he added.

According to a report from the Social Affairs Ministry in March this year, 28,590 disabled soldiers nationwide were receiving government pensions, among a total of 94,169 veterans living in Cambodia.

The British Embassy announced on Tuesday that it would fund two projects to bolster governmental accountability and democracy in Cambodia. The embassy disbursed US$51,537 to the Advocacy and Policy Institute, which will use the money to promote open dialogue between civil society and governmental officials in specific issues areas. A total of $65,392 was also given to the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia for use in improving the transparency of Cambodia’s voter registration process.

On the 4th day of the KRT preliminary hearing held on 30 June 2011, Nuon Chea’s defense lawyer informed the court that his client asks that the judges investigate Vietnam’s role before and during the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime era and not just during the 1975-1979 era alone.

Nuon Chea’s lawyer raised the necessity for this investigation because numerous decisions made by the DK regime were taken because of Vietnam’s policy.

Nuon Chea said that the bombing [on Cambodia] must be investigated also in order to learn clearly about food [shortage] problem prior to 1975. If it was true, what is its effect on the Cambodian people? Does the DK regime have the ability to resolve this issue or not?

Nuon Chea’s lawyer indicated that it is also necessary to investigate the KR army commanders from the eastern zone who [claims that] the cadres have no role to exercise their power.

Nuon Chea also asks for an investigation into Duch’s statement claiming that he (Nuon Chea) was savage in the crimes perpetrated in the Tuol Sleng jail.

Khieu Samphan also protested to the hearing chamber saying that the names of his witnesses do not appear the tribunal’s roster, but the majority of the prosecution’s witnesses are listed. He added that there were some names of his witnesses, but they turn out to be prosecution witnesses for questioning instead. Khieu Samphan promised that he will turn in his list of witnesses in writing one more time. He asked the hearing chamber to listen to his side also if it wants to know clearly because in the past people talked too much about him.

The Nobel peace laureate and human rights campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi spoke yesterday in a BBC lecture of the vital role played by communications technology in modern democratic uprisings and said she was not morally opposed to the use of violence in exceptional circumstances.

The Burmese opposition leader and general secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD) has recorded two speeches for the annual BBC Reith Lectures, which were smuggled out of Burma last week.

In the first, which will be broadcast on Radio 4 next Tuesday, Ms Suu Kyi compared the 23-year struggle to win democracy in Burma to the fast-moving revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and said that the widespread availability of internet-based technology in the Arab world had been a crucial factor in the success of those movements.

The lecture was broadcast yesterday to an invited audience at Broadcasting House in London. Afterwards, speaking from a secret location in Rangoon, Ms Suu Kyi told presenter Sue Lawley that, just as Nelson Mandela had altered his position on political protest, “it’s possible” she might change her longstanding commitment to non-violence.

“I have said in the lectures I do not hold to non-violence for moral reasons but practical and political reasons,” she said. She said Mahatma Gandhi, the “father of non-violence”, had “said that between cowardice and violence he would choose violence any time”.

Ms Suu Kyi, who was 66 last Sunday, the first birthday she has celebrated as a free woman in nearly a decade following her release from house arrest last November, said the Burmese people wished to emulate the success of Arab democratic movements.

“The similarities between Tunisia and Burma are the similarities that bind people all over the world who yearn for freedom,” she said. But two key differences had ensured that “the outcomes of the two revolutions have been so different”, she added.

“The first dissimilarity is that while the Tunisian army did not fire on their people, the Burmese army did. The second, and in the long run probably the more important one, was that the Tunisian revolution enjoyed the benefits of the communications revolution and this not only enabled them to better organise and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them. Not just every single death but every single [person] wounded can be made known to the world within minutes.”

Speaking from a simple room decorated with a single vase of flowers and wearing an orange-coloured blouse, she said that “in Libya, in Syria and in Yemen now, the revolutionaries keep the world informed of the atrocities of those in power” and that “communications means contact”.

During the Q&A, she said the Burmese uprising of 1988 might have been successful if the world had seen what was happening. “The communications revolution made a lot of difference [in Tunisia],” she said, noting that although the Burma uprising was “much worse” in terms of violent repression, it had gone unreported.

“The shooting and the lack of images throughout the whole world had a lot to do with the way which our revolution has been going on for such a long time,” Ms Suu Kyi said.

In Tunisia and Burma, young people had played a pivotal role in the uprisings, she said, applauding the influence of “young rappers” in Burma. “For those who believe in freedom, young rappers represent a future unbowed by… oppression and injustice.”

During the live session, Aung San Suu Kyi was in the company of the BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson. She said that in making her broadcasts she was “exercising my right to freedom of communication”.

She spoke on the nature of being a dissident and talked with fondness of her colleagues in the NLD headquarters. “Their weapons are their faith, their armour is their passion,” she said. Dissidents had chosen their path, she said, but “it’s not a decision made lightly – we do not enjoy suffering, we are not masochists”.

In a passionate address she quoted Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, the English poet William Henley and the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, finishing with lines from Rudyard Kipling’s The Fairies’ Siege. In the second lecture, which will be broadcast on 5 July, Aung San Suu Kyi will speak of the forces aligned against her National League for Democracy.

Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark her father General Aung San’s 96th birth anniversary at the National League for Democracy (NLD) headquarters in Rangoon, Burma, on February 13, 2011. (Soe Than Win/AFP/Getty Images)

Burma’s Suu Kyi says the protests sweeping the Arab World are an inspiration.

June 28, 2011
Global Post

Burma’s national hero and democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has called the protests sweeping the Arab World an “inspiration” to the Burmese people.

“The universal human aspiration to be free has been brought home to us by recent developments in the Middle East. The Burmese are as excited by these events are as people elsewhere,” Suu Kyi said in a BBC radio interview to be broadcast Tuesday, AFP reports.

The interview is part of a series of BBC Reith lectures that Suu Kyi has given.

“Unable to broadcast in Burma, she agreed to meet a small team of BBC journalists and engineers who entered the country illegally in order to record her two lectures and smuggle out the tapes. These were played to a small invited audience in London last week, and at the end Aung San Suu Kyi answered questions live by satellite phone, installed by BBC News,” the Guardian reports.

Burma, also known as Myanmar, has been ruled by a dictatorship since 1962.

In the interview, Suu Kyi compared the battles in the Middle East against oppressive, authoritarian regimes to her own people’s efforts to overthrow their government.

Burmese took to the streets in 1988 and again in 2007 to demand political reform and regime change. Both times, government forces gunned down peaceful demonstrators.

“Why is the Arab Spring an inspiration to the Burmese? Because we have lived it ourselves,” the Nobel laureate said in the interview. “We in Burma envy Egypt’s quick and easy revolution.”

The junta freed Suu Kyi in November 2010 after seven straight years of house arrest. Some Burma observers argued the government freed her to distract the international community from the recent fraudulent election.

In the interview, Suu Kyi, 66, makes comparisons between Tunisia’s December revolution that overthrew its government, and Burma’s protests in 1988, Reuters reports. She said both started with small, seemingly unimportant events that turned into national calls for freedom.

A major difference, she said, is that the Tunisian army did not fire on its own people, whereas the Burmese one did. Tunisia also had more advanced communications.

“The second [difference], and in the long-run probably the more important one, is that the Tunisian revolution enjoyed the benefits of the communications revolution.

“This not only enabled them to better organize and coordinate their movements. It kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them,” she said.

Suu Kyi also makes the point in the interviews that she does not hold her supporters to non-violence, the Guardian states.

The Guardian reports that Suu Kyi may be using these BB lectures to inject new energy into her supporters in Burma and abroad.

FILE – In this Feb. 22, 2011 file photo, movie star Michelle Yeoh walks together with Cambodian school children as she presides over a helmet campaign to promote traffic awareness, at Sampov Meas primary school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Former Bond girl Yeoh, who plays Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi in an upcoming biopic, says she is “saddened” by her recent deportation from the country. The Malaysian actress arrived in the country’s main city, Yangon, on June 22 and was deported the same day because she was on a blacklist, a government official said on Tuesday, June 28, 2011. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith, File)

06/30/2011
By MIN LEE
AP Entertainment Writer

HONG KONG—Former Bond girl Michelle Yeoh, who plays Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in an upcoming biopic, says she is “saddened” by her recent deportation from the country.

The 48-year-old Malaysian actress arrived in the country’s main city, Yangon, on June 22 and was deported the same day because she was on a blacklist, a government official said Tuesday.

In her first comment on the deportation, Yeoh said in a statement Thursday that she was “shocked and terribly saddened by the action.” She said she harbors no ill will and remains fond of Myanmar and its people.

Yeoh said she was treated “cordially” by immigration officials in Yangon but wasn’t given a reason for her deportation. Myanmar’s repressive government has rejected visa requests from journalists and perceived critics for years.

The star of films such as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Memoirs of a Geisha” and the James Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies” was making a “private trip as a tourist,” assistant Kit Wong told The Associated Press in an email.

“I continue to cherish hopes to see this country continue its progress toward peace and democracy and to be able to return soon,” the Malaysian star said in her statement.

Yeoh visited Myanmar in December to meet with Suu Kyi but her portrayal of the democracy icon in the Luc Besson picture “The Lady” was shot in Thailand. The movie is scheduled to be released later this year.

Suu Kyi, 66, spent most of the last two decades detained by the former military junta. She was released last year, just days after elections that her party boycotted and in which she was barred from being a candidate.

The elections were the nation’s first in 20 years, and in March, the junta handed power to a nominally civilian government. But critics say little has changed and the new government is merely a front for continued rule by the army, which took power in 1962.